The common factor in Erika Adamsson’s works is various types of captured moment. She depicts atmospheres, nostalgia and stasis. Regardless of the subject, a child’s face or the ragged harmonies of the environment communicate intense moods to the viewer.
She believes that certain juxtapositions of colours make it possible to create mental images of different time periods. Subdued pastel shades combined with broken browns transport the viewer to the 1950s and 60s, while chocolate brown makes flaming orange glow, taking viewers to the atmosphere of the 1970s. The high contrast and colour saturation remind us of film images. In her new paintings Adamsson romanticizes views of her hometown in bygone decades, catching the lingering moods of an eternal Sunday. When looking at old cityscapes the significance of an earlier culture and its preservation are amplified, and this theme gives the exhibition a sense of making a statement.
Melodrama can be a consolation and dilapidated buildings from the past can be cherished memories in a changing urban milieu. For the portraits in the exhibition Adamsson creates a built environment and the paintings contain a strong movement, growing sharper, from the light effects on the skin of the facial portraits to the tiny pedestrians and details of the background cityscape. She has great faith in the power of painting to create new viewpoints on the familiar, and even the everyday environment, using the means of contemporary painting. Adamsson paints in oils on aluminium, in which the pure tones resonate in parallel with the broken colours, and the painting’s shiny aluminium ground reacts to the light through gaps in the pigment.
Coinciding with this new solo show, Adamsson has an exhibition at the Tikanoja Art Museum in Vaasa, the subjects of the works centring on interiors that exude nostalgia. The romantic, wistful gaze of the set of works at Makasiini Contemporary is turned on the city and its people.
